Is Pope Joan real or a meme?

Damn son where'd you find this Pepe?

meme, to my understanding when the cardinals elect a pope they touch his balls just in case, this is a special ceremony

it began as slander against a pope from a disgruntled rival, then in the 19th century there was a popular italian novel and a movie in the 20th century, those popularized the story

special indeed

I have a book about the papacy that talks about her, I'll post the chapter, it's pretty small.

CHAPTER VI
Pope Joan

(855?–857?)

>After Leo, John, an Englishman born at Mainz, was pope for two years, seven months, and four days, and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the Papacy of one month. It is claimed that this John was a woman, who as a girl had been brought to Athens in the clothes of a man by a certain lover of hers. There she became proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge until she had no equal, and afterward in Rome, she taught the liberal arts and had great masters among her students and audience. In the city the opinion of her life and learning grew ever higher, and she was the unanimous choice for pope. While pope, however, she became pregnant by her companion. Through ignorance of the exact time when the birth was expected, she was delivered of a child while in procession from St. Peter’s to the Lateran, in a narrow lane between the Colosseum and St. Clement’s Church. After her death, it is said that she was buried in that same place. The Lord Pope always turns aside from this street, and it is believed by many that this is done because of abhorrence of the event. Nor is she placed on the list of the holy pontiffs, both because of her female sex and on account of the shamefulness of the event.

>So, in the year 1265, wrote a Dominican monk named Martin in Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatum. Originally from Troppau in Poland, Martin had made his way to Rome, where he served as chaplain to Clement IV. His book proved, by the standards of the time, immensely popular, with versions of it—all laboriously copied by hand—circulating throughout Europe. It is largely thanks to him that the legend of Pope Joan, who is said to have reigned from 855 to 857, between Leo IV and Benedict III, has become one of the hoariest canards in papal history.

>Martin is not the first chronicler in whose work the story occurs. Several of his predecessors are credited with it, the first of them being Anastasius the papal librarian (there will be more about him in the next chapter) who, if Joan had existed, would have known her personally. But though their histories may have been written earlier, all the surviving copies of them comfortably postdate Martin. Some omit Joan altogether; some refer to her as John VII or VIII;1 one—an early Vatican manuscript of Anastasius—includes her but in an obvious insertion at the bottom of the page and in a later (fourteenth-century) script; and most of the rest echo Martin’s words so closely as to leave no doubt that they are using him as their authority. A few lend additional glosses to the story—that Joan was killed by a furious populace and buried on the spot, that she ended her life in a convent, that her son became Bishop of Ostia—but the main lines remain intact: that in the mid–ninth century a certain Englishwoman became pope and that she reigned some two and a half years until, by some unhappy miscalculation, she gave birth to a baby on the way to the Lateran.

>One chronicler only gives a version of the story different enough to be worth quoting in full. He is Jean de Mailly, another Dominican, who lived at Metz near the German border and was largely responsible for the Chronica Universalis Metensis, which first appeared some fifteen years earlier than Martin’s history but achieved nowhere near the same degree of acclaim. “Query:” he writes,

>oncerning a certain pope or rather female pope, who is not set down in the list of popes or bishops of Rome, because she was a woman who disguised herself as a man and became, by her character and talents, a curial secretary, then a cardinal and finally pope. One day, while mounting her horse, she gave birth to a child. Immediately, by Roman justice, she was bound by the feet to a horse’s tail and dragged and stoned by the people for half a league. And where she died, there she was buried, and at the place is written, Petre, Pater Patrum, Papisse Prodito Partum (“O Peter, Father of Fathers, Betray the Childbirth of the Woman Pope”). At the same time, the four-day fast called “the fast of the female pope” was first established.

>A particularly curious feature of Mailly’s version is that he dates Joan’s pontificate to nearly two and a half centuries later than Martin, to 1099—the date usually attributed to Paschal II, whose accession he cheerfully postpones to 1106. Joan is thus allowed to reign for no fewer than seven years—a long time indeed to maintain her deception. But this dating would in any case be manifestly impossible. During the middle of the ninth century Rome, sacked by the Saracens in 846, was still going through her dark ages. All was confusion, records were few and untrustworthy, and the notion of a woman pope was, perhaps, just conceivable. Three and a half centuries later, on the other hand, the times were thoroughly documented; the story of Pope Joan would have been as impossible then as it would be today.

>NEVERTHELESS, THAT STORY had by then been firmly established in the popular mind, and there for centuries it remained. Even Bartolomeo Platina, prefect of the Vatican Library under Sixtus IV (1471–1484), inserts “John VIII” between Leo IV and Benedict III in Lives of the Popes and tells the story in considerable detail. “These things which I relate,” he adds, “are popular reports, but derived from uncertain and obscure authors, which I have therefore inserted briefly and baldly, lest I should seem obstinate and pertinacious by omitting what most people assert…although,” he continues, “what I have related may not be thought altogether incredible.”

>At the time of the Reformation, Joan became, of course, an admirable stick with which to beat the Church of Rome. As early as the Council of Constance in 1414–1415, the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus was only too pleased to use her as part of his evidence. Significantly, the Council did not deny it: as the French eighteenth-century historian Jacques Lenfant perceptively pointed out, “if it had not been looked upon at that Time as an undeniable Fact, the Fathers of the Council wou’d not have fail’d either to correct John Hus with some Displeasure, or to have laugh’d and shook their Heads, as…they did presently for less cause.” At the same time, the reference to Joan—Hus, like several other chroniclers of his time, actually calls her Agnes—cannot have endeared him to the Council; but he probably knew by then that he could not escape the stake so felt that he had little to lose.

>The Welshman Adam of Usk, who spent four years in Rome from 1402 to 1406, gives an account of the coronation procession from St. Peter’s to the Lateran of Pope Innocent VII in 1404, in the course of which he confirms an interesting detail in Martin’s version:

>After turning aside out of abhorrence for Pope Agnes, whose image in stone with her son stands in the straight road near St. Clement’s, the pope, dismounting from his horse, enters the Lateran for his enthronement.

>The Basilica of St. John Lateran had been built by Constantine the Great on the site of a first-century cavalry barracks and had immediately become—as it still is today—the cathedral of the pope in his capacity as Bishop of Rome. Since it stands at the opposite end of the city from St. Peter’s, there were frequent processions between the one and the other, passing through the center of Rome by way of the Colosseum and the Basilica of San Clemente. It was probably somewhere near the latter, on the Via San Giovanni in Laterano, that the offending statue stood. We can have no doubt that it existed—it is mentioned in all the old handbooks for pilgrims—though there is a considerable difference of opinion as to the form it actually took. Theodoric of Niem, cofounder of the German College in Rome, reported in about 1414 that the image was of marble and that it “represented the fact as it occurred; that is to say, a woman who was delivered of a child.” Martin Luther, on the other hand, who was in the city toward the end of 1510—and was surprised that the popes should have allowed such an embarrassment in a public place—wrote of “a woman wearing a papal cloak, holding a child and a scepter.” We can take our choice. We shall never know, because the statue—together with the stone and its alliterative inscription—is long gone, almost certainly removed in about 1480 by Pope Sixtus IV, who is said to have had it thrown into the Tiber.

>Nor can there be any doubt that the place was regularly avoided by the popes. John Burchard, Bishop of Strasbourg and papal master of ceremonies under Innocent VIII and his two successors, Alexander VI and Pius III, ruefully records how he was brave enough to break tradition:

>In going as in returning, [Pope Innocent] came by way of the Colosseum, and that straight road where the image of the female pope is located, in token, it is said, that John VII [sic] gave birth there to a child. For that reason, many say that the popes may never ride on horseback there. And so the Lord Archbishop of Florence…reprimanded me.

>But let us return to Adam of Usk:

>And there [in the Lateran] he is seated in a chair of porphyry, which is pierced beneath for this purpose, that one of the younger cardinals may make proof of his sex; and then, while a Te Deum is chanted, he is borne to the high altar.

>The fullest description of this chaise percée, by means of which the Church made sure that so embarrassing an occurrence should never be repeated, is that given by Felix Haemmerlein (De Nobilitate et Rusticitate Dialogus, c. 1490):

>up to the present day the seat is still in the same place and is used at the election of the pope. And in order to demonstrate his worthiness, his testicles are felt by the junior cleric present as testimony of his male sex. When this is found to be so, the person who feels them shouts out in a loud voice, “He has testicles!” And all the clerics present reply, “God be praised!” Then they proceed joyfully to the consecration of the pope-elect.

>He specifically confirms that this was because of Pope Joan, pointing out that it was her successor, Benedict III, who set up the pierced chair.
What are we to make of all this? Can we honestly believe that successive popes—they would have included Pope Alexander VI, who is known to have fathered any number of children—would have subjected themselves to such undignified gropings?2 The mists begin to clear when we compare two more fifteenth-century accounts. The first is by an Englishman, William Brewin, who in 1470 compiled a guidebook to the churches of Rome. In the Chapel of St. Savior in St. John Lateran, he tells us,

>are two or more chairs of red marble stone, with apertures carved in them, upon which chairs, as I heard, proof is made as to whether the pope is male or not.

>The second is once again by Bishop Burchard:

>The pope was led to the door of St. Sylvester’s Chapel, near which were placed two plain porphyry seats, in the first of which, from the right of the door, the pope sat, as though lying down; and when he was thus seated, the…prior of the Lateran gave into the pope’s hand a rod, in token of ruling and correction, and the keys of the Basilica and the Lateran Palace, in token of the power of closing and opening, of binding and loosing. The pope then moved to the other chair, from which he handed back the rod and keys.

>“Two plain porphyry seats”: these were the so-called sedia curules, which for some four hundred years were used in papal enthronements. One was looted by Napoleon’s army and taken to the Louvre;3 the other remains in Rome, though now in the Vatican Museum, whither it was removed by Pius VI at the end of the eighteenth century. It now stands, unlabeled, in a window recess of the Gabinetto delle Maschere. It has indeed a hole in the seat, cut in the shape of a huge keyhole; more curious, however, is the angle of the back, some forty-five degrees to the vertical. One would indeed sit on it “as though lying down”; it could not possibly serve as a commode. One explanation that has been put forward is that it was originally intended as an obstetric, or “birthing,” chair (“closing and opening, binding and loosing”?) and that it was used in the coronation ceremony to symbolize the Mother Church. It cannot be gainsaid, on the other hand, that it is admirably designed for a diaconal grope; and it is only with considerable reluctance that one turns the idea aside.

>The last of the major pieces of evidence in favor of the existence of Pope Joan—or at least of the widespread belief in her legend—is the series of papal busts in the Cathedral of Siena. Their date is uncertain, but the late fourteenth century seems most likely. There are 170 of them, beginning with St. Peter to the right of the crucifix in the center of the apse, and continuing counterclockwise around the building until they end with Pope Lucius III, who died in 1185. Sure enough, Joan was included—in her proper place between Leo IV and Benedict III, her bust carrying the clear inscription JOHANNES VIII, FOEMINA DE ANGLIA. Most regrettably, she is no longer there, Clement VIII having had her removed in about 1600.

There's a whole book on the Popess Joan in the manner of pop history. see also here:
pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2009/03/pre-tarot-images-of-pope-joan.html
trionfi.com/0/i/r/02.html
popessofthetarot.blogspot.com
ludustriumphorum.blogspot.com/2009/03/van-rijnberks-mysterious-papesse.html

>What became of the bust is unclear. Cardinal Caesar Baronius, Clement’s librarian, claimed that it was immediately destroyed; but early in the seventeenth century Antoine Pagi, the provincial of the Franciscans in Arles, went to stay at his order’s house in Siena, where he recorded conversations with various priests and churchmen. According to them, rather than break up the bust it had been decided simply to relabel it. After minor remodeling, it became a portrait of Pope Zachary (741–752), who now appears in the series in his correct chronological position.

>WITH SO MUCH conflicting evidence, can we be absolutely sure that Pope Joan never existed? Alas, we can. Two particularly cogent indications emerge, from writings respectively by a patriarch and a pope. The first comes from Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 858 to 865, who would therefore have been Joan’s exact contemporary. Photius had no love for Rome, against which indeed he bore a considerable grudge, but he nevertheless specifically refers to “Leo and Benedict, successively great priests of the Roman Church.” Two centuries later, Pope Leo IX (1049–1054) wrote to Patriarch Michael Cerularius:

>God forbid that we wish to believe what public opinion does not hesitate to claim has occurred in the Church of Constantinople: namely that in promoting eunuchs indiscriminately against the First Law of the Council of Nicaea, it once raised a woman onto the seat of its pontiff. We regard this crime as so abominable and horrible that although outrage and disgust and brotherly goodwill do not allow us to believe it, nevertheless, reflecting upon your carelessness toward the judgment of Holy Law, we consider that it could have occurred, since even now you indifferently and repeatedly promote eunuchs and those who are weak in some part of their body not only to clerical office, but also to the position of pontiff.

>Had Leo ever heard of the existence of Pope Joan, is it likely that he would have laid himself open to the patriarch’s obvious retort? And had the patriarch been aware of her, would he not have so retorted? We can only conclude that in the middle of the eleventh century her legend was unknown in Rome.

>There is solid evidence, too. Our most reliable sources record that Leo IV died on July 17, 855, and that Benedict III was consecrated on September 29. We also know that the Emperor Lothair I died in the Ardennes within hours of Benedict’s consecration. Naturally, however, the news took some time to reach Rome, during which denarii were minted there with the words BENEDICT PAPA on one side and HLOTHARIUS IMP PIUS on the reverse. It follows that Benedict could not have succeeded any later than the records state and that there would simply have been no room for Joan.

>But perhaps the best argument of all is the sheer improbability of a female pope, a long deception, a hidden pregnancy, a sudden birth in public. Female popes are unlikely enough in the first place, and in real life it is rare indeed for a woman to give birth in the street. Are these events not stretching our credulity just a little too far? Of course they are, yet there is another improbability, almost as great as these, which we are obliged to accept: that this mildly grotesque story was almost universally accepted within the Catholic Church for several centuries, and that poor incautious Joan still has her champions today.4

Finished. The source is Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy by John Julius Norwich

Who?

Thanks m8

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So like the Spanish Inquisition then which didn't get its bad rep until 19th century protestant writers used it to demonize the Catholic church?